What follows is a collection of photos taken during a road trip across Arizona I took with my mother in December of 2022.
A number of years ago a friend introduced me to ECM with the Steve Tibbetts album Big Map Idea.
When I finally acquired the LP, I was taken by the picture on the back of the album cover. Credited to Dieter Rehm, a longtime ECM collaborator, the picture of a map propped up on a dashboard captures the sense of discovery that makes travel so special.
Rehm has taken essential features of travel and adventure - the car, the open road, the map - and rendered them in a scene that is otherwise so spare that it could be anywhere, and the navigator could be anyone. Looking at the photo makes me nostalgic for a trip that I wasn't on.
You can see the influence this photo has had on my work. The travel images I make are meant to invite the same nostalgia that I experience with Rehm's image.
